“Maybe he don’t like you,” Buck Small gave his opinion.
“Might be,” I admitted as I climbed into the saddle for the third time.
The lemon-tinted devil was getting warmed up by now, was beginning to take pride in his work. He let me stay aboard longer than before, so he could slam me off harder.
I was sick when I hit the ground in front of Peery and Milk River. It took me a little while to get up, and I had to stand still for a moment, until I could feel the ground under my feet.
“Hold him a couple of seconds—” I began.
Peery’s big frame stood in front of me.
“That’s enough,” he said. “I ain’t going to have you killed on my hands.”
I shook my head violently, trying to clear it, so I could see him better.
“Get out of my way,” I growled. “I like this. I want more of it.”
“You don’t top my pony no more,” he growled back at me. “He ain’t used to playing so rough. You’re liable to hurt him, falling off carelessly like that.”
I tried to get past him. He barred my way with a thick arm. I drove my right fist at his dark face.
He went back, busy trying to keep his feet under him.
I went over and hoisted myself up on Rollo.
I had the buckskin’s confidence by this time. We were old friends. He didn’t mind showing me his secret stuff. He did things no horse could possibly do. Looking down, I was surprised not to see his kidneys and liver—because I knew damned well he was turning himself inside out.
I landed in the same clump of brush that had got me once before.
I couldn’t see much when I got up—only the yellow of Rollo.
I heard Peery’s bass voice, protesting to somebody:
“No, let the damned fool kill himself if he wants to.”
I heaved myself wearily into the saddle again.
For a while I thought Rollo had had enough. He was a well-behaved animal under me. That was fine. I had ridden him at last.
Nonsense! He was fooling.
He put his nose in the sand. He put it in the sky. And, using his head for a base, he wagged his body as a puppy would wag its tail.
I went away from him—and stayed where I landed.
I didn’t know whether I could have got up again if I had wanted to. But I didn’t want to. I closed my eyes and rested. If I hadn’t done what I had set out to do, I was willing to fail.
Small, Dunne and Milk River carried me indoors and spread me on a bunk.
“I don’t think that horse would be much good to me,” I told them. “Maybe I’d better look at another.”
“You don’t want to get discouraged like that,” Small advised me.
“You better lay still and rest, fella,” Milk River said. “You’re liable to fall apart if you start moving around.”
I took his advice.
V
When I woke up it was morning, and Milk River was prodding me with a finger.
“You figuring on getting up for breakfast, or would you like it brung to you?”
I moved cautiously until I found I was all in one piece.
“I can crawl that far.”
He sat down on a bunk across the room and rolled a cigarette while I put on my shoes—the only things, except my hat, I hadn’t slept in. He had something to say, so I gave him time, lacing my shoes slowly.
Presently he said it:
“I always had the idea that nobody that couldn’t sit a horse some couldn’t amount to nothing much. I ain’t so sure now. You can’t ride any, and never will. You don’t seem to have the least notion what to do after you get in the middle of the animal! But, still and all, a hombre that’ll let a bronc dirty him up three times handrunning and then ties into a gent who tries to keep him from making it permanent, ain’t exactly hay wire.”
He lit his cigarette, and broke the match in half.
“I got a sorrel horse you can have for a hundred dollars. He don’t take no interest in handling cows, but he’s all horse, and he ain’t mean.”
I went into my money-belt—slid five twenties over into his lap.
“Better look at him first,” he objected.
“You’ve seen him,” I yawned, standing up. “Where’s that breakfast you were bragging about?”
Six men were eating in the chuck-shack when we came in. Three of them were hands I hadn’t seen before. Neither Peery, Wheelan, nor Vogel was there. Milk River introduced me to the strangers as the high-diving deputy sheriff, and, between bites of the food the one-eyed Chinese cook put on the table, the meal was devoted almost exclusively to wise cracks about my riding ability.
That suited me. I was sore and stiff, but my bruises weren’t wasted. I had bought myself a place of some sort in this desert community, and maybe even a friend or two. In less than a day I had accomplished what, by milder means, would have taken weeks, or months. These cowhands were kidding me just about as they would have kidded each other.
We were following the smoke of our cigarettes outdoors when running hoofs brought a swirl of dust up the draw.
Red Wheelan slid off his horse and staggered out of the sand-cloud.
“Slim’s dead!” he said thickly.
Half a dozen voices shot questions at him. He stood swaying, trying to answer them. He was drunk as a lord!
“Nisbet shot him. I heard about it when I woke up this mornin’. He was shot early this mornin’—in front of Bardell’s. I left ’em aroun’ midnight last night, an’ went down to Gaia’s. I heard about it this mornin’. I went after Nisbet, but”—he looked down sheepishly at his empty belt—“Bardell took m’ gun away.”
He swayed again. I caught him, steadying him.
“Horses!” Peery bawled over my shoulder. “We’re going to town!”
I let go of Wheelan and turned around.
“We’re going to town,” I repeated, “but no foolishness when we get there. This is my job, and if I want any help I’ll tell you.”
Peery’s eyes met mine.
“Slim belonged to us,” he said.
“And whoever killed Slim belongs to me,” I said.
That was all on the subject, but I didn’t think I had made the point stick.
VI
An hour later we were dismounting in front of the Border Palace, going indoors.
A long, thin, blanket-wrapped body lay on two tables that had been pushed together. Half the citizens of Corkscrew were there. Behind the bar, Chick Orr’s battered face showed, hard and watchful. Gyp Rainey was sitting in a corner, rolling a cigarette with shaky fingers that sprinkled the floor with tobacco crumbs. Beside him, paying no attention to anything, not even looking up at our arrival, Mark Nisbet sat.
“By God, I’m glad to see you!” Bardell was telling me, his fat face not quite so red as it had been the day before. “This thing of having men killed at my front door has got to stop, and you’re the man to stop it!”
I noticed that the Circle H. A. R. men had not followed me into the center of the room, but had stopped in a loose semi-circle just inside the street door.
I lifted a flap of the blanket and looked at the dead man. A small hole was in his forehead, over his right eye.
“Has a doctor seen him?” I asked.
“Yes,” Bardell said. “Doc Haley saw him, but couldn’t do anything. He must have been dead before he fell.”
“Can you send for Haley?”
“I reckon I can.” Bardell called to Gyp Rainey, “Run across the street and tell Doc Haley that the deputy sheriff wants to talk to him.”
Gyp went gingerly through the cowboys grouped at the door and vanished.
I didn’t like this public stuff. I’d rather do my questioning on the side. But to try that here would probably call for a showdown with Peery and his men, and I wasn??
?t quite ready for that.
“What do you know about the killing, Bardell?” I began.
“Nothing,” he said emphatically, and then went on to tell me what he knew. “Nisbet and I were in the back room, counting the day’s receipts. Chick was straightening the bar up. Nobody else was in here. It was about half-past one this morning, maybe.
“We heard the shot—right out front, and all run out there, of course. Chick was closest, so he got there first. Slim was laying in the street—dead.”
“And what happened after that?”
“Nothing. We brought him in here. Adderly and Doc Haley—who lives right across the street—and the Jew next door had heard the shot, too, and they came out and—and that’s all there was to it.”
I turned to Gyp.
He spit in a cuspidor and hunched his shoulders.
“Bardell’s give it all to you.”
“Didn’t see anything before or after except what Bardell has said?”
“Nothin’.”
“Don’t know who shot him?”
“Nope.”
I saw Adderly’s white mustache near the front of the room, and I put him on the stand next. He couldn’t contribute anything. He had heard the shot, had jumped out of bed, put on pants and shoes, and had arrived in time to see Chick kneeling beside the dead man. He hadn’t seen anything Bardell hadn’t mentioned.
Dr. Haley had not arrived by the time I was through with Adderly, and I wasn’t ready to open on Nisbet yet. Nobody else there seemed to know anything.
“Be back in a minute,” I said, and went through the cowboys at the door to the street.
The Jew was giving his joint a much-needed cleaning.
“Good work,” I praised him; “it needed it.”
He climbed down from the counter on which he had been standing to reach the ceiling. The walls and floor were already comparatively clean.
“I not think it was so dirty,” he grinned, showing his empty gums, “but when the sheriff come in to eat and make faces at my place, what am I going to do but clean him up?”
“Know anything about the killing last night?”
“Sure, I know. I am in my bed, and I hear that shot. I jump out of my bed, grab that shotgun, and run to the door. There is that Slim Vogel in the street, and that Chick Orr on his knees alongside him. I stick my head out. There is Mr. Bardell and that Nisbet standing in their door.
“Mr. Bardell say, ‘How is he, Chick?’
“That Chick Orr, he say, ‘He’s dead enough.’
“That Nisbet, he does not say anything, but he turn around and go back into the place. And then comes the doctor and Mr. Adderly, and I go out, and after the doctor looks at him and says he is dead, we carry him into Mr. Bardell’s place and put him on those tables.”
That was all the Jew knew. I returned to the Border Palace. Dr. Haley—a fussy little man whose nervous fingers played with his lips—was there.
The sound of the shot had awakened him, he said, but he had seen nothing beyond what the others had already told me. The bullet was a .38. Death had been instantaneous.
So much for that.
I sat on a corner of a pool table, facing Mark Nisbet. Feet shuffled on the floor behind me and I could feel tension making.
“What can you tell me, Nisbet?” I asked.
He didn’t look up from the floor. No muscle moved in his face except those that shaped his mouth to his words.
“Nothing that is likely to help,” he said, picking his words slowly and carefully. “You were in in the afternoon and saw Slim, Wheelan, Keefe and I playing. Well, the game went on like that. He won a lot of money—or he seemed to think it was a lot—as long as we played poker. But Keefe left before midnight, and Wheelan shortly after. Nobody else came in the game, so we were kind of short-handed for poker. We quit it and played some high-card. I cleaned Vogel—got his last nickel. It was about one o’clock when he left, say half an hour before he was shot.”
“You and Vogel get along pretty well?”
The gambler’s eyes switched up to mine, turned to the floor again.
“You know better than that. You heard him riding me ragged. Well, he kept that up—maybe was a little rawer toward the last.”
“And you let him ride?”
“I did just that. I make my living out of cards, not out of picking fights.”
“There was no trouble over the table, then?”
“I didn’t say that. There was trouble. He made a break for his gun after I cleaned him.”
“And you?”
“I shaded him on the draw—took his gun—unloaded it—gave it back to him—told him to beat it. He went.”
“No shooting in here?”
“Not a shot.”
“And you didn’t see him again until after he had been killed?”
“That’s right.”
I got down from my perch on the table and walked over to Nisbet, holding out one hand.
“Let me look at your gun.”
He slid it swiftly out of his clothes—butt-first—into my hand. A .38 S. & W., loaded in all six chambers.
“Don’t lose it,” I said as I handed it back to him, “I may want it later.”
A roar from Peery turned me around. As I turned I let my hands go into my coat pockets to rest on the .32 toys.
Peery’s right hand was near his neck, within striking distance of the gun I knew he had under his vest. Spread out behind him, his men were as ready for action as he. Their hands hovered close to the bulges that showed where their weapons were packed.
“Maybe that’s a deputy sheriff’s idea of what had ought to be done,” Peery was bellowing, “but it ain’t mine! That skunk killed Slim. Slim went out of here toting too much money. That skunk shot him down without even giving him a chance to go for his iron, and took his dirty money back. If you think we’re going to stand for—”
“Maybe somebody’s got some evidence I haven’t heard,” I cut in. “The way it stands, I haven’t got enough to convict Nisbet, and I don’t see any sense in arresting a man just because it looks as if he might have done a thing.”
“Evidence be damned! Facts are facts, and you know this—”
“The first fact for you to study,” I interrupted him again, “is that I’m running this show—running it my own way. Got anything against that?”
“Plenty!”
A worn .45 appeared in his fist. Guns blossomed in the hands of the men behind him.
I got between Peery’s gun and Nisbet, feeling ashamed of the little popping noise my .32s were going to make compared with the roar of the guns facing me.
“What I’d like”—Milk River had stepped away from his fellows, and was leaning his elbows on the bar, facing them, a gun in each hand, a purring quality in his drawling voice—“would be for whosoever wants to swap lead with our high-diving deputy to wait his turn. One at a time is my idea. I don’t like this idea of crowding him.”
Peery’s face went purple.
“What I don’t like,” he bellowed at the boy, “is a yellow puppy that’ll throw down the men he rides with!”
Milk River’s dark face flushed, but his voice was still a purring drawl.
“Mister jigger, what you don’t like and what you do like are so damned similar to me that I can’t tell ’em apart. And you don’t want to forget that I ain’t one of your rannies. I got a contract to gentle some horses for you at ten dollars per gentle. Outside of that, you and yours are strangers to me.”
The excitement was over. The action that had been brewing had been talked to death by now.
“Your contract expired just about a minute and a half ago,” Peery was telling Milk River. “You can show up at the Circle H. A. R. just once more—that’s when you come for whatever stuff you left behind you. You’re through!”
/> He pushed his square-jawed face at me.
“And you needn’t think all the bets are in!”
He spun on his heel, and his hands trailed him out to their horses.
VII
Milk River and I were sitting in my room in the Cañon House an hour later, talking. I had sent word to the county seat that the coroner had a job down here, and had found a place to stow Vogel’s body until he came.
“Can you tell me who spread the grand news that I was a deputy sheriff?” I asked Milk River, who was making a cigarette while I lit one of the Fatimas he had refused. “It was supposed to be a secret.”
“Was it? Nobody would of thought it. Our Mr. Turney didn’t do nothing else for two days but run around telling folks what was going to happen when the new deputy come. He sure laid out a reputation for you! According to his way of telling it, you was the toughest, hardest, strongest, fastest, sharpest, biggest, wisest and meanest man west of the Mississippi River.”
“Who is this Turney?”
“You mean you don’t know him? From the way he talked, I took it you and him ate off the same plate.”
“Never even heard any rumors about him. Who is he?”
“He’s the gent that bosses the Orilla County Company outfit up the way.”
So my client’s local manager was the boy who had tipped my mitt!
“Got anything special to do the next few days?” I asked.
“Nothing downright special.”
“I’ve got a place on the payroll for a man who knows this country and can chaperon me around it.”
He poured a mouthful of grey smoke at the ceiling.
“I’d have to know what the play was before I’d set in,” he said slowly. “You ain’t a regular deputy, and you don’t belong in this country. It ain’t none of my business, but I wouldn’t want to tie in with a blind game.”
That was sensible enough.
“I’ll spread it out for you,” I offered. “I’m a private detective—the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. The stockholders of the Orilla Colony Company sent me down here. They’ve spent a lot of money irrigating and developing their land, and now they’re about ready to start selling it.